Wednesday, December 29, 2010

George W. Bush's utterly mendacious ghostwritten memoir contains only one mention of the looting of the Iraq National Museum. It comes in the context of a rare admission that "there was one important contingency for which we had not adequately prepared":

In the weeks after liberation, Baghdad descended into a state of lawlessness. I was appalled to see looters carrying precious artifacts out of Iraq's national museum and to read reports of kidnapping, murder, and rape. Part of the explanation was that Saddam had released tens of thousands of criminals shortly before the war. But the problem was deeper than that. Saddam had warped the psychology of Iraqis in a way we didn't fully understand. The suspicion and fear that he had cultivated for decades were rising to the surface.

"What the hell is happening?" I asked during an NSC meeting in late April. "Why isn't anybody stopping these looters?"

The short answer was that there was a manpower shortage in Baghdad. The Iraqi police force had collapsed when the regime fell. The Iraqi army had melted away. Because of Turkey's decision, many of the American troops who liberated Baghdad had been required to continue north to free the rest of the country. The damage done in those early days created problems that would linger for years. The Iraqis were looking for someone to protect them. By failing to secure Baghdad, we missed our best chance to show that we could.

True enough. But the excuse that "Saddam had warped the psychology of Iraqis in a way we didn't fully understand", cultivating "suspicion and fear" that were now "rising to the surface," reflects the stupidity and intellectual laziness that characterized Bush and his gang. As I and many others have made abundantly clear, there was massive evidence that Iraqis were willing and able to loot their country's cultural institutions if given the opportunity: the many regional museums looted within 24 hours of the establishment of no-fly zones back in the 1990s should have made that clear enough that the national museum would be targeted. McGuire Gibson, the Archaeological Institute of America, and many others from the archaeological community warned explicitly that looting was almost certain to occur (Gibson in a face-to-face meeting with Ryan Crocker in late January). And, as we know now thanks to Elizabeth Stone's forensic examination of time-series satellite imagery, the redeployment of Iraqi troops away from the site areas in January 2003, in preparation for the impending invasion, unleashed a wave of looting on Iraq's sites even before the US arrived.
These looters were not driven by a warped psychology of suspicion and fear, but by a much simpler psychological mechanism that Bush and other freemarketers certainly could have understood: the profit motive. Antiquities are valuable commodities. It doesn't take a genius to imagine that a country reduced to anarchy will resemble the purest of free markets. But it is easier to blame Saddam instead.
In any case, once Bush saw that the museum had been looted (how, it is hard to say, since to my knowledge there is no footage showing looters carrying objects out of the museum), he should have immediately asked, "What the hell is happening?" Yet he waited until late April to pose this question (assuming that the memoir didn't just make up this remark). That speaks volumes about the fecklessness of our worst President.

Friday, December 10, 2010

CNN reports on the problems at Pompeii. One major cause is a dramatic reduction in the Ministry of Culture's budget for conservation, cut in half between 2000 and 2008. The money seems instead to have gone to produce and promote theatre and shows at Pompeii, which is unconscionable by any standard, but also to archaeological excavations:

“The financial resources available for restoration and conservation have always been negligible. Instead it is preferred to dig, rather than preserve what has already been discovered,” explained former superintendant of the ancient city, Pietro Giovanni Guzzo.

The archaeological community faces a serious ethical problem here, as in Iraq and elsewhere, when limited resources are being misallocated in ways that support archaeological discovery but at the cost of leaving sites to the mercy of nature, looters, and tourists. Would a boycott on digging by archaeologists until and unless adequate funding for site conservation and protection is put in place do any good?

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

While the image of the Brits setting up a museum in Iraq to display artifacts removed from Iraq may leave one a bit queasy at the neo-colonialist overtones, this is actually a great idea worth emulating as a form of cultural diplomacy in other countries. One hopes that State Department officials are in discussions with the Met, the Art Institute, and other universal museums with holdings that could and should make visits to their countries of origin.

Kudoes to the indefatigable John Curtis and especially to Major General Barney White-Spunner for imagining and pushing this, and to the British Museum for backing the effort to raise funds.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

A well-deserved honor for a dedicated, hardworking group that is one of the few governmental offices focusing on heritage protection issues. Though I have been critical of the State Department's policies for defining "protection" in such a way as to not have to address the need to protect sites from looting, the Cultural Heritage Center has done a great job within the mandate under which it operates. Congratulations to Director Maria Kouroupas and her staff!

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Hugh Eakin interviewed Marion True last month in the New Yorker, clearly on her side in the "ordeal", noting that the defense never made its case (it never presented its case, true enough, but surely there was a case to be made based on the massive amount of circumstantial evidence offered in Watson and Tedeschini's Medici Conspiracy).

True does deserve some sympathy as a pawn in a bigger game, but the stakes of that game are not made clear in the article. A comment by "Anderson" on Eakin's interview offers what is probably the consensus view of the case's relationship to the broader issues it is enmeshed with, those of the black market trade in looted -- not merely illicit -- antiquities and the impact museums have and could have on that market:

I have been following this case and what a black joke it all is. The international traffic in pillaged art is a huge and hugely depressing problem for anybody with an ounce of humanity and love of art, history and culture. But. It has to be said that Italy is a train wreck of a country, politically (I love Italy in every other way), with a president that has spent the last decade or so urinating on the rule of law there, where the garbage can't even be collected reliably, and where they cannot even begin to stop organized crime from the ongoing looting of their cultural heritage, very often even the heritage in their museums, much less what is buried in the ground in Puglia or Sicily or wherever. Much of the rest of the world with a significant archaeological history is in much worse shape. So the Italians prosecute a woman, not even the museum she worked for, to send a message to museums, which aren't even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of the problem, and have actually been really trying to help as best they can over the last couple of decades, as one would expect, dedicated as they are to the love of history, art and culture. I bet there are a lot of lawyers out there who are really happy though.

No doubt Italy has its problems, including finding adequate resources to protect its vast holdings, as we see from the collapse of the gladiatorial building in Pompeii and the plastering of advertisements on palazzi in Venice. And no doubt museums -- even museums as wealthy as the Getty -- buy only a tiny fraction of what is looted. But it would be wrong to conclude that what museums do makes no difference or that museums have been helping as best they can. Museums have a vested interest in bringing artifacts that are out of the ground into their collections, not in protecting those not yet excavated. Adopting a clean-hands policy is the least, not the best, museums could do. The best would be to forcefully urge their collector-donor-board members to support measures to clean up the antiquities trade (by legal changes making it much more difficult to traffic inadequately provenanced antiquities, reversing the burden of proof, etc.), and to urge those same wealthy collectors to voluntary donate and/or ask the government to impose taxes on antiquities sales to raise money that would be dedicate to the hiring of more site guards, satellite monitoring, or any one of dozens of ways in which looting of sites could be reduced. The shame of this prosecution is that it did not send that message to museums.

Monday, November 15, 2010

A major and largely unexcavated Buddhist site in Afghanistan, Mes Aynak, whose importance is comparable to that of Bamiyan, is being frantically studied by archaeologists to see what can be salvaged before the site is destroyed by a gigantic copper-mining operation. The Chinese government-run mining group is investing $3.5 billion, with the Afghan government standing to reap $1.2 billion per year, according to this article. (That's in addition, one supposes, to the $880 million before production reported by the Wall Street Journal). Either way, it is big money. Only 18 archaeologists -- 16 Afghans and 2 Frenchmen -- are working the one square mile site with a few dozen laborers, an area that would normally need 100 laborers and several dozen archaeologists. The hoped-for budget for this minimal team? Only $10 million, of which the Afghan government has allotted $2 million. The US has promised funding but not said how much.

So to summarize: a major site is going to be destroyed after a totally inadequate salvage archaeological project, because the $20-30 million needed to do the job properly is not even going to be asked for, even though the profits following the site's destruction are going to be billions upon billions. The Afghan government should be going back to the Chinese and demanding that the costs of a fullbore salvage operation be covered, and the US government should be working the problem. Are we? Or does the prospect of destroying the equivalent of Bamiyam not matter when development rather than fanaticism is the motivation?

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Below are a few more instances I've been able to cull from WarLogs describing antiquities being found together with weapons. To put these incidents in some perspective, it should be noted that there are 1020 documents in the WarLogs that mention smuggling (and many of these are duplicate reports, so the actual number of anti-smuggling operations is probably closer to 500); that is out of a total of almost 392,000 total reports posted to WarLogs.

The total number of reports in which antiquities are reported found together with weapons, then, is very low, in the neighborhood of 1-2% (only 6 or so out of something like 500 smuggling incidents). It is possible that antiquities might have been found but not reported because they were not considered important enough to mention, but there is no way to know this.

It is also worth noting that the WarLogs do not contain all reports made during the war; missing are reports of smuggling of any kind before 1/1/2004. The major looting shown by Elizabeth Stone to have occurred in 2003 would therefore not register at all on WarLogs if those antiquities were being smuggled out before 2004.

The incidents that we do have, while few in number, are enough to make clear that while most smugglers did not smuggle antiquities along with RPGs, rockets, body armor, and mortars, some did.

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order to contrast the illegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have

2004-10-28 23:40:00

Expand acronyms: Take care; definitions may be wrong.

In An Nasiriyah (south part) started a search op. In order tocontrast theillegal detention of weapons and %%% carried out by MSU/Military Police joint with local police. The followings (in good conditions) have been impounded by local police: 3 2x automatic rifle; 3 4x %%%; 3 4x air rifles; 3 3x %%% 1x ak %%% rifles; 3 1x %%% rifle; 3 2x pattern rifles; 3 1x stern rifle; 3 1x gun; 3 5x hand grenades; 320x electric detonators; 3 10x gun magazine; 3 33x ak %%% magazines; 3 2x %%% rocket for rpg; 3Various calibre %%%. An IZ has also been arrested by local police for illegal detention of weapons and %%%. The INFO-OPS, which started yesterday, carried out by Task forceMSU jointwith provincial archaeological local guard in , , %%% and %%% (located north west of ( %%%)) ended this morning. The op. Aim was to opposeandrepress the illegal tradeofarchaeologicalstolen finds in %%% province. As result of the op. several vases, statues andtools dated %%% bc. All finds were given to archaeological authority of %%%.

THREAT WARNING: POSS Attack ON (: %%% DEC %%%)

2005-12-28 00:22:00

Expand acronyms: Take care; definitions may be wrong.

%%%. AS OF LATE %%%, AN UNIDENTIFIED GROUP REPORTEDLY WAS PLANNING AN ATTACKUSING EIGHT %%% ROCKETS ON THE %%% NEAR AN NASIRIYAH FOR . (%%% COMMENT: THE EXACT TIMING AND ATTACK PLAN DETAILS WERE NOT KNOWN.) THE EIGHT %%% ROCKETSWERE PURCHASED BY (()) (()) %%% STORED ON '%%% FARM. '%%% FARM WAS LOCATED IN %%% VILLAGE, NEAR THE . %%% ALLEGEDLY WAS AFFILIATED WITH %%%/ANTIQUITIES IN AN NASIRIYAH. (()) (%%%), A FORMER MILITARY OFFICER TRAINED IN ARTILLERY, %%% WOULD HANDLE LAUNCHING THE ROCKETS FROM %%% VILLAGE.

%%%. THE ALLEGED PLAN FURTHERSPECIFIED THAT WITHIN TWO TO THREE HOURS AFTER ATTACKING THE %%%, THE OFFICE OF THE MARTYR %%% (OMS) OFFICE IN AN NASIRIYAH WOULD BE ATTACKED BY THE SAME GROUP. THE GROUP REPORTEDLY HOPED TO MAKE ITAPPEAR THE %%% AT %%% HAD RETALIATED AGAINST THE OMS IN AN EFFORT TO GAIN %%%'A SYMPATHY FOR '%%% GROUP.

TIMELINE:
: -%%% CONDUCTED A UNILATERAL %%% DRIVEN RAID TO CAPTURE -%%%. SUSPECT WAS DETAINED WITH 6X GUARDIAN DEVICES IN HIS HOME AND 2X ARTIFACTS. INFORMATION WASGATHERED THROUGHTHE FLEXIBLEMAINTENANCEWORKERPROGRAM IN %%%. HHC/-%%% AND -- %%% REFINED THE INFORMATION FROM THE %%% AND PASSED TO HIGHER HQ FOR ABrigade LEVEL OPERATION. %%% RECEIVED PERMISSION TO ENTER %%% CITY FROM MAJOR GENERAL , %%% ISF PARTNERSHIP AND COORDINATION. THE SYSTEMS WERE IN Coalition ForcesHANDS BY %%%.

S2 ASSESSMENT:
%%% AN Facility protection service GUARD AT BIAP WHO HAS PRIOR REPORTING OF BEING CORRUPT AND A MEMBER OF %%%. WE BELIEVE %%% GUARDIAN SYSTEMS FROM ANOTHER INDIVIDUAL WHO WAS GOING TO USE %%% THE DEVICES TO SOMEONE IN %%%. FURTHER TQ AND INTERROGATION OF %%% THE OTHER MEMBERS INVOLVED WITH THE THEFT OF THIS SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT.

SUMMARY:
%%% X CACHE
%%% X ARREST
%%% X INJ
%%% X DMG

//CLOSED// %%%

(FRIENDLY ACTION) RAID Report %%% AD DIN OPS/ : %%% UE DET

2008-07-03 15:00:00

Expand acronyms: Take care; definitions may be wrong.

THE ISF RAIDED THE RESIDENTIAL COMPLEX IN %%% AREA, '%%% HOUSE WAS RAIDED AND THEY FOUND SOME ANTIQUES, THEY ALSO CAPTURED THE FOLLOWING :